This encyclopedic collection of essays by leading scholars on Japanese theatre history provides a useful pedagogical resource and a fascinating reference for scholars of any aspect of Japan. It is divided into three main sections: ritual and classical forms; medieval and early modern theatre; and modern and contemporary theatre. Three additional sections – meta-patterns, theatre architecture and theatre criticism – offer synthesis and reflections pertaining to the eponymous issues. The volume brings together fifty-eight contributors in various career stages in twenty-four chapters, placing main chapters in dialogue with interluding studies to broaden the discussion. As an up-to-date, accessible and comprehensive overview of Japanese theatre, this volume offers an instructive model for academic reference works. As introduced by Jonah Salz, the publication embraces theatre not limited to its logocentric form but as inclusive of musical, dance and dramatic genres of the stage arts (butai geijutsu). In portraying an unbroken braid of Japanese performing arts despite historical ruptures, persisting internal and external boundaries are revealed.
The discussion by Shinko Kagaya and Miura Hiroko of Noh and Kyōgen as derived from outcaste religious performance in shrines, temples and markets, for example, reflects the privileging of aristocratic minimalist solemnity grounded in myths (Nihongi, Kojiki, Manyōshū), while Kyōgen, as explicated by Salz, offered comic relief for merchants and commoners. Similarly, as Paul Griffith, Okada Mariko and Suzuki Masae show, Nihon Buyō performed by geisha, courtesans and blind musicians is indebted to Ryūkyū ritual traditions, as evident in its reliance on the shamisen, an object of Japanese–Chinese diplomatic exchange.
As the second section shows, the rise of mercantile wealth in the medieval period was parallelled by melodramatic Kabuki (see Julie Iezzi) and Bunraku (see Gotō Shizuo) – replete with historical battles (jidaimono) and popular melodrama (sewamono) – as well as the comedic forms Rakugo and Manzai (see Matthew Shores) and sideshow attractions (yose and misemono as popular variants). Ingrained in these forms were the overlapping magical and quotidian worlds of deities and master–servant relations based on Buddhist sermons (sekkyō). As Iezzi shows, the Tokugawa government imposed control over Kabuki to maintain gender roles and class divisions.
Coming to the Meiji Restoration in the third section, Western exposure triggered the replacement of feudalism and Buddhist dominance with a hybridized Shintō constitutional monarchy. As Brian Powell explains, while Kabuki was renovated as a national institution fit for foreign dignitaries, Western psychological literary drama (engeki) was introduced. Guohe Zheng shows how ‘new drama’ (shingeki), which mirrored the voices and concerns of the growing Japanese labour movement, was increasingly suppressed through the Chian iji hō (Peace Preservation Law, 1925). Dialogical relations became monological as most shingeki groups disbanded by 1940 and members voluntarily joined, or were coerced to join, national (kokumin) performing arts groups (see Samuel Leiter's chapter, pp. 251–63).
In the aftermath of the Fifteen Years War, Zheng finds that the tone quickly shifted from liberation to resuppression of left-wing shingeki (pp. 268–81). In an emphasis on musical and traditional theatre entertainment and cultural export in national and private theatres (see Kevin Wetmore, pp. 285–88), issues of war responsibility, political conversion (tenkō) and collaboration remained vexed. In this context, Kan Takayuki explains how an anti-authoritarian and anti-rationalist angura theatre and butoh dance refocused on the body and cultural legacies in repurposed spaces (shōgekijō) as student-led political activism rejected the orthodox left in the 1960s (Kan Takayuki, pp. 288–320).
As angura artists migrated to mainstream theatres during peak wealth in the 1980s, Cody Poulton finds that shōgekijō artists splintered into dramatic realism, post-angura minimalism, postmodern pastiche and dystopian and critical theatre and performance. In the subsuming economic and population crises punctuated by the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō subway attack and the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, Poulton notes how Hirata Oriza, self-proclaimed leader of the ‘quiet theatre’ movement, has critiqued the prevailing bias for traditional performing arts in pedagogical curricula and urges younger practitioners to inform their neoteny-infused ‘quiet theatre’ with a ‘solid theoretical basis’ (p. 361).
As a rich and thorough survey of Japanese theatre for a wide readership the volume is a success. From reading the closing essay by Salz on intercultural cross-pollination and an interview with Ninagawa Yukio, it would seem that tensions in East–West, dance–theatre and traditional–modern binaries will continue to animate Japanese theatre. As the least developed section in the book, compared to the extensive coverage given to the classical forms in this volume, the modern and contemporary period in Japanese theatre calls for further contributions from younger generations of performing artists, scholars and critics concerning their own interpretations, conceptions and directions in the performing arts in Japan.
